Marvel’s Silent War: How ‘Inhumans’ And ‘The Gifted’ Prove The X-Men Can Never Be Replaced

For the last few years, the X-Men have had an unexpected archenemy. Not Magneto or Apocalypse, but still just as dangerous to Charles Xavier’s found family as the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. The X-Men’s main threat has been the Inhumans. If you’re a lifelong X-fan like myself, the word “Inhuman” has elicited groans long before the unceremonious debut of their new TV show. The last week has seen a culmination of sorts to a feud, a silent war between the Inhumans and the X-Men as two TV shows–ABC’s Marvel’s Inhumans and Fox’s The Gifted–debuted. These shows highlight the fundamental differences between these two factions of the Marvel Universe and prove that one could never truly replace the other–but first, you gotta learn about the silent war.

The X-Men debuted in 1963’s The X-Men #1, written by Stan Lee with art by Jack Kirby. Presented as the next stage in human evolution, mutants quickly evolved into a powerful metaphor for any persecuted minority. These heroes were hated and feared. The Inhumans, also created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, didn’t debut in their own series. The Royal Family formally debuted in 1965’s Fantastic Four #45. These strange and powerful characters were an offshoot of humanity that diverged millions of years ago due to extraterrestrial tampering. Every living Inhuman is a direct descendent from those experiments, possessing powers that emerge upon exposure to the mystical Terrigen Mists.

Despite both being races of enhanced humans published by Marvel Comics, the two groups rarely interacted. While the X-Men rose to pop culture dominance in the early ’90s through best-selling comics and a smash hit cartoon, the Inhumans remained low key. They had a short-lived ongoing series in the ’70s and featured in stories here and there, but they never came close to touching the X-Men. ’90s kids could probably identify a comparatively obscure X-character like Shatterstar before they could name the Inhuman king Black Bolt. This popularity disparity in the ’90s would lead to an intellectual property battle 20 years later.

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When Marvel declared bankruptcy in 1996, that led them to aggressively pursue a financial win in another medium: film. Blade, an R-rated horror/action film starring Wesley Snipes as the vampiric Marvel antihero, was a hit in 1998, and that emboldened Marvel to go even bigger for its next project, X-Men. Director Bryan Singer treated the source material seriously, not shying away from the comic’s serious undertones by opening the 2000 film in a concentration camp. The moviegoing public, burned by the uneven campiness of Batman & Robin just three years earlier, responded positively to the film. There’s just one catch: the financially struggling Marvel Comics had to sell the X-Men’s film rights to Fox in order to make all this happen.

20th Century Fox Licensing

Fast-forward eight years as Marvel experiences a similarly unexpected blockbuster in the form of Jon Favreau’sIron Man. Despite being around since the ’60s, Tony Stark was far from a household name before he became inextricably tied to Robert Downey Jr., and this time the success all flowed back to Marvel’s newly formed movie studio. The success of the X-Men and Spider-Man films in the early ’00s allowed Marvel to create their own studio, one they could use to make films starring characters that weren’t as popular in the ’90s when Marvel made money by selling film rights. Those characters were predominantly Avengers characters (Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Ant-Man), niche characters (Doctor Strange), or hella obscure characters (the Guardians of the Galaxy). That list also included the Inhumans, characters that has maintained a steady but subdued presence in the Marvel line.

Fast-forward to 2011, the eve of the release of Marvel Studios’ massive team-up movie The Avengers. Marvel was committed to aggressively expanding their cinematic universe. There was just one problem: Marvel Studios didn’t have the rights to the X-Men. They’d sold those off to Fox a decade earlier, a move done to ensure that Marvel Comics could stay afloat and eventually create Marvel Studios. If Marvel Studios wanted a quick and easy way to explain how characters got powers, they couldn’t just say they were a mutant like they did in the comics. They could, however, say they have Inhuman DNA. That’s when the silent war starts. I call it a silent war not as a shout out to the Inhumans story of the same name, but because all of this is treated as a conspiracy theory due to a continued lack of acknowledgement by Marvel. All we have to go on are what actually happened, but the motivations behind each of these moves is left unclear.

Here’s a timeline:

December 2013: Marvel’s Inhumanity event exposes the entire Earth to the Terrigen mist, waking up a new population of Inhumans and making them functionally similar to mutants

September 2014: The X-Men (and also the Fox-owned Fantastic Four) begin to disappear from all Marvel Comics (not Marvel Studios) merchandise and video games

November 2015: Marvel Comics begins a storyline wherein the Inhumans’ power-giving Terrigen mist is literally killing all the mutants, which really just trolled all the X-Men fans

2016-2017: The Inhumans line is larger than ever, boasting a rotating lineup of team books (Uncanny Inhumans, All-New Inhumans, Secret Warriors), team-up series (Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur), and solo series (Ms. Marvel, Karnak, Black Bolt)

It’s hard not to see the rise of the Inhumans and the decline of the X-Men in that four-year stretch. All that happened while the Inhumans’ prominence spread to TV in ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Over the past few months, there has been an uptick in X-content at Marvel as the line has grown and the deadly Terrigen story resolved (in, quite literally, a comic called Inhumans vs. X-Men). 2017 is the first year in a while where it doesn’t feel like the X-Men are under siege. Then something bananas happened in late 2016: plans for the Inhumans feature film in 2018 were replaced with what we have now, a TV series that got to hang out in IMAX theaters for a week. And we also have The Gifted, the latest offering from that deal Marvel made with Fox almost 20 years ago.

This was all a long walk to get to this point, but I had to set up the stakes that X-Men fans have been living with for years: this last week has felt like sweet, sweet comeuppance for X-Men fans. To be clear, I’m an X-Men fan first and a Marvel fan second, so that also means I don’t want any Marvel Studios project to fail. I wanted to like Iron Fist and, you know, it woulda been great to have a good Inhumans show too. I do believe that there is room for both the Inhumans and the X-Men at Marvel, but being an irrational human with an emotional brain, I’ve also attached the two properties to the Inhumans’ detriment. When I see Medusa and Black Bolt, I see stand-ins for Phoenix and Cyclops, the characters Marvel would have 100% put on that backpack were it made in 1997 as opposed to 2017. So to see Marvel’s Inhumans receive…the reaction it’s received…it makes it feel like the X-Men are the definitive victors of this silent war.

Photo: Fox

It helps that The Gifted, which debuted just three days after Inhumans, is very good (and praised). It also helps that these shows perfectly demonstrate why this silent war was silly to begin with, and why the Inhumans can never replace the X-Men. It’s all there in each series’ pilot: both Inhumans and The Gifted open with super-powered girls on the run for their lives from dangerous government agencies. In Inhumans, the nameless girl dies and her would-be rescuer Triton (Mike Soh) seemingly perishes right away. We do not know these characters, and every other Inhuman we meet is equally detached and void of relatable motivation. In The Gifted, that pursued girl is a teleporter named Clarice (a.k.a. Blink, played by Jamie Chung), who uses her own powers to escape and then becomes our entry character into the larger world. We stick with her, an underdog and fugitive, and grow attached to her.

As seen in the show, the Inhumans are regal, detached from humanity genetically and physically. They have holed up on the moon and created their own society (with their own inhumane caste system that includes slaves???). They are detached, aloof, and not of our world. And when they come to our world, as Black Bolt (Anson Mount) does, they are mystified by cell phones and the notion of “shopping.” As in the comics, when you become an Inhuman, you become part of a larger medieval-style monarchy–and if you don’t have flashy Inhuman powers, into the pit you go.

ABC

Contrast that to what we see in The Gifted, which pulsates with raw human emotion despite the show focusing on super-powered mutants. These are characters we feel for, like the hot-tempered Polaris (Emma Dumont), harried mother Caitlin (Amy Acker), and powerful teens Lauren (Natalie Alyn Lind) and Andy (Percy Hynes White). These characters are messy, flawed, and based on Earth (Georgia, to be exact). That’s what the X-Men are in the comics. Mutants aren’t part of a monarchy; they have to fight to survive and, hopefully, find a makeshift family to replace what they’ve lost along the way. That’s what we get in The Gifted, as the Strucker family forges an uneasy alliance with the Mutant Underground.

The Inhumans could never replace the X-Men, because they serve a completely different purpose. The Inhumans are regal whereas the X-Men are real. The Inhumans are high fantasy whereas the X-Men are soap opera. The Inhumans exist above you whereas the X-Men operate amongst you. There is absolutely room for both, and there was room for both shows to be great. But, after four years of a silent war, I’m obviously glad that The Gifted came out on top.